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Airline bosses visit memorial near Alps crash site

Jane Onyanga-Omara USA Today
Published 9:04 a.m. CT April 1, 2015

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CEO of Germanwings Thomas Winkelmann and Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr, left, arrive with a wreath of flowers at a stone slab erected as a monument, set up in memory of the victims in the area where the Germanwings jetliner crashed in the French Alps, in Le Vernet, France, Wednesday, April 1, 2015. The heads of Lufthansa and its low-cost airline Germanwings are visiting the site of the crash that killed 150 people amid mounting questions about the co-pilot and how much his employers knew about his mental health.(Photo: AP Photo/Claude Paris)

The bosses of Germanwings and its parent company, Lufthansa, on Wednesday visited a memorial near the site of the crash in the French Alps that killed all 150 people aboard.

Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr and his Germanwings counterpart, Thomas Winkelmann, landed by helicopter in Seyne-les-Alpes, before traveling to the small village of Le Vernet and laying flowers at the stone monument.

Spohr said: "It was very important for us to come here today to mourn the victims, to experience the deep sorrow here at this monument."

He said the airlines would "do everything" to support the location's transformation into a place of mourning for relatives and friends of the victims, and to "restore this beautiful countryside as much as we can" when the investigation is finished.

Spohr said "it will take a long, long time" to understand what caused the crash. He refused to say what the airline knew about the mental health of co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, 27, who investigators suspect of deliberately crashing the plane, the Associated Press reported.

The Düesseldorf-bound Airbus A320 crashed into the French Alps less than an hour after departing Barcelona on March 24.

Authorities on Wednesday said they have finished collecting human remains from the site. Lt. Col. Jean-Marc Menichini said investigators "will continue looking for bodies, but at the crash site there are no longer any visible remains," the AP reported. Officials at France's national criminal laboratory near Paris said it will take a few months to identify the victims and for the remains to be returned to the families.

Lubitz told his flight school in 2009 that he had suffered a "serious episode of severe depression," Lufthansa said Tuesday. The airline said the note was found in e-mails the co-pilot sent to its flight school when he returned to training.

"Thereafter the co-pilot received the medical certificate confirming his fitness to fly," Lufthansa said in a statement.

David Gregory, Dorothy Day Professor of Law & Executive Director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law at St. John's University, said there was "every indication" of criminal gross negligence, which could result in criminal prosecutions, "posing the possibility of damages in numbers that could threaten the very future of the airline."

On Tuesday, French and German publications Paris Match and Bild said they have obtained cellphone video taken inside the plane in the seconds before the crash. They said the video was found amid the wreckage by a source close to the investigation.

French police said the video was a hoax, but the German newspaper Bild said its authenticity was unquestionable.